Time Machine Wipe & Start Over

A bit ago I covered my plan for a comprehensive backup plan for my Mac. I thought when OS X Mt. Lion (10.8) came out that being able to use 2 Time Machine drives would fix my, one-in one-out, process. However it did not. When you swap back in the drive that’s a month out of date it still doesn’t always pickup where it left off, and to add to that you get a notice every couple days that the other drive is unavailable for backup. So 1 drive at a time is best in my experience.

After swapping the drives most often it freaks out saying the drive is full and seems unable to actually do house cleaning or pickup where it left off. My guess it regards the drive a new backup not a continuation. So I find it best to start anew each month. After swapping the drive, follow this procedure to wipe the newly back in service Time Machine drive and start off a fresh new month of back up data.

Correct swap in a new Time Machine drive that has been used before:

Stop using the backup drive in Time Machine: Open System Prefs, Time Machine, Select Disk, Click the disk that is active, ‘Remove Disk’. Confirm ‘Stop Using This Disk’.

Stop time machine: Open System Prefs, Time Machine, click the big ‘Off’ switch.

Force Eject Time Machine Drive:

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on Monday, April 29th, 2013 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Blog.
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